Latest review of The Loch of the Bees

Details: Created: 30 March 2026

The Loch of the Bees book cover. — Sense of history hailed in new review.

The Loch of the Bees, the new book by Donald S Murray, is continuing to pick up glowing reviews.

Fresh from a positive Times review (behind a paywall) comes the latest appreciation by David Robinson on the booksfromscotland.com website.

Robinson applauds Donald for his ‘sense of the past’. This skill enables the past to flow through the book’s characters so strongly that it “almost becomes the story itself.”

States Robinson: “This sense of history as something which continues to shape the present is never more clearly displayed than in Murray’s latest novel, The Loch of the Bees. Its ambition is epic: nothing less than reimagining the lives of people living on a fictional Hebridean island from the eighth century to the present through a series of interlinked stories.”

Commenting that history flows through us all, the reviewer says The Loch of the Bees captures it perfectly, adding: “The late Allan Massie – no mean writer of historical fiction himself – hailed Murray as ‘one of the best and most enjoyable novelists writing in Scotland today’. If he had lived to read The Loch of the Bees, it would have only confirmed his judgment.”

Read the full review on booksfromscotland.com

The Loch of the Bees
Saraband Books
ISBN 9781916812635
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Donald S. Murray was raised in the Ness district of the Isle of Lewis. He spent his teenage years at The Nicolson Institute secondary school in Stornoway - in those days, pupils from rural districts stayed in school hostels in the town rather than returning home each night – before studying at the University of Glasgow in the 1980s. After receiving an MA (Joint Hons) in English and Scottish Literature, he went on to gain a Diploma in Education and a Secondary Teaching Qualification.

Since then, Donald has written an ever-growing range of books and published a wide variety of essays, columns, short stories, and poems in the likes of The Herald, The Guardian, and The Island Review. His writing, both of fiction and non-fiction, has received widespread critical acclaim and appeared on shortlists and longlists for numerous literary awards.

His debut novel, As the Women Lay Dreaming, won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the The Herald Scottish Culture Awards Outstanding Literature Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award in 2019.

In 2015, Sequamur, Donald’s first full-length Gaelic play, was performed throughout Scotland, including at the Edinburgh Festival, as well as in Belfast, London, and Ypres in Belgium. Described as 'moving, powerful, with a message that resonates today,' it examined the effect of the First World War on the The Nicolson Institute in Stornoway.

As a native Gaelic speaker, Donald’s voice can often be heard on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, while on BBC Radio Four he has featured on Open Book with Mariella Frostrup. He has appeared on TV, on BBC Four’s Birds Britannia, a series looking at the different birds that live in the UK, and on The Last Seabird Summer, which examined the decline of seabirds in the North Atlantic.

Donald also regularly speaks at book festivals and conferences around the world, and has delivered talks at the University of Reykjavik in Iceland; the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland; the Nordic Centre in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands; the Blasket Centre in Dingle, Ireland; and the Pisa International Book Festival in Italy, among others. In 2020, he was elected as a committee member of the Society of Authors in Scotland, which protects the rights and interest of authors.

After 30 years as an English teacher, Donald became a full-time writer in 2012. He now lives and works in Shetland.

(Updated July 27, 2021)